


who wants too much

by flyby



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn
Genre: Community: khrfest, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-05
Updated: 2010-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyby/pseuds/flyby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hayato hasn't been back to Sicily since he left his father's house, but it's not like he has anywhere else to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	who wants too much

**Author's Note:**

> For khrfest, from the prompt _Gokudera - distrust; "I'm growing tired of these fucking grown man liars."_ Set a month or so before the series starts, and probably slightly AU. Title from the saying: "He who wants too much catches nothing."

**_who wants too much_ **

"Well?" Hayato coughs into his fist, tucks one hand into his pocket and tries to will his shoulders to settle into casual lines. His back is stinging like a bitch; he'd done the math right, but of course no one had bothered to mention the fuel stored in the warehouse. After all, it's not like he's _family_ , just an expendable for hire. His shirt is fucking singed, and it pisses him off almost as much as the condescending, superior look on this bastard's face.

"Not bad, kid, not bad." A flash of gold teeth and stale whiskey, and Hayato shifts away with a grimace as the older man makes as if to ruffle his hair like he's really still a kid, like he hasn't spent four years erasing every trace he can of the spoiled, naïve, _weak_ little brat his father had made. Killing his old self by inches, making his own name step by step across most of Italy, blowing shit up for whichever Family will pay him.

Gleaming black eyes narrow, and Hayato curses himself silently; he knows that look too well. Not that he even wants anything to do with this crappy little upstart 'family', barely even a fucking gang. He just wants his money, a bed for the night, a damn cigarette. That's all.

"Not bad at all," the guy repeats in this fake thoughtful voice, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. The fabric of his suit catches the light of the street lamp, cheap and shiny like everything about him, this two-bit gangster pretending to be mafia. "Benito, give the lad his money. Yes, we could use a... _dedicated_ young man like you." There's something unpleasant in his tone; Hayato barely spares a glance for the hulking shape of Benito lumbering out of the shadows, tucking the envelope he's offered inside his jacket. The Gordi boss coughs a nasty chuckle, cheap rings glinting as he pulls an equally cheap cigar out of his breast pocket and lights up. Hayato does his best to act like his stomach hasn't tightened, like the scent of cigar smoke doesn't send him right back to his bastard father's study. Scowling, he backs away from the cloud of smoke Gordi exhales at him.

"You got another job or what?" he grumbles, making a half-hearted effort to sound at least a little deferential. He knows he's good, knows he's one of the fucking best in fact, but he's nothing to this bastard and he knows that too. The guy coughs out puffs of foul smoke when he laughs, flips something small across the alley. Hayato catches it two-fingered – a matchbook? - and hunches his shoulders, waiting for the rest.

"An... establishment in Catania. The owner, well." There's something in that smirk that Hayato doesn't like at all. "Let's just say that anyone who could take that place out would certainly have a place with us."

Hayato has to grind his teeth; just how much does this small-fry fucker know about him? He wants to punch the greasy smirk off the bastard's face, knock out those showy gold teeth and shove dynamite down his throat until he chokes on it. He swallows rage, shoves his hands in his pockets to hide their twitching.

"Whatever. What are you paying?" Fucking Sicily; it had better be good. Never mind that his father's territory is at the other end of the island; Hayato hasn't been back since he'd sneaked onto that boat in Messina, spent a week nauseous and terrified in the reeking hold until Ravenna.

Gordi names a sum close to what he would initially have asked, enough to keep him in a cheap apartment and smokes for a couple of months. Hayato narrows his eyes, but Gordi's shit-eating grin says that they both know he can't afford to pass this up. Fucker. He knows how it'll go; there'll be a catch, like always, and all the talk of a place for him will turn out to be empty lies, like always, just grease for the deal. Money is money, though.

"Fine." He spits on his hand, tries not to cringe when the older man's meaty fist engulfs his to seal the deal.

"You'll go far, kid." Gordi laughs like a donkey and turns to shove his way back into the bar, the lumbering hulk of Benito at his back. Hayato bites off a curse, reassures himself that he could take them both if it came down to it, and wipes his slimy hand ostentatiously on the equally suspect brickwork. If nothing else, he thinks sourly, it's an opportunity to get the hell out of Naples. For that, he could almost be grateful to the bastard.

* * *

He's decidedly less grateful when he staggers off the boat onto Sicilian soil, swearing to himself that next time he'll get the train and to hell with the expense. By the time he's left his shit in the cheapest hotel room he can find (the wrinkled nonna behind the desk glaring at him suspiciously over her knitting) and scoped out the target, he's cursing Gordi up one side and down the other. No wonder the fucker had smirked like that.

Whichever way he looks at it, he's screwed. Hayato stomps into the bar, glaring at the waiter who opens to his mouth to make some crack about his age, and orders espresso in the most challenging voice he can muster. There's a booth in the back, out of the way of the half-drunken sailors and stevedores filling the place, and he yanks out his laptop as the waiter shuffles over with his coffee.

Hayato slouches down with his back to the wall, flicking through saved web pages as he runs through his options. If he hits this place, like Gordi wants, the warehouse in back will go up along with it, and he's not dumb enough to have missed the suits hanging about back there. Low-level muscle, sure, but the way they'd moved put them way above rabble like Gordi. Who'd probably been planning this; fucking great. Hayato scowls, fingering the coil of fusewire braided around his wrist. His own damn fault, for letting the money – the dim prospect of a _family_ – take priority over common fucking sense. He can't back out of it now, not having taken the hit; while he's damn sure he could take out Gordi and most of his men without much difficulty, he already has a reputation among the Families. If he breaks this deal, he'll have nowhere left to go.

"Fuck," Hayato hisses, furious with himself, because he has to do it. The coffee is bitter in his throat, with a sour aftertaste that lingers on his tongue as he tosses a handful of coins on the table, slouching back out and heading into the city. As if to add insult to injury, he'd almost forgotten the date.

The cathedral is easy enough to find, cool and dim inside. Hayato pauses to bow his head for appearances' sake, and buys two candles. One for the Virgin, who he figures would probably have some sympathy for unwed mothers, and one for Saint Cecilia. He has no memory of her face or her voice, though he thinks she must have spoken Japanese to him; when he'd attacked the language in that first year, buying second-hand books with what change he could scrape together and sneaking into libraries to study, it had been less like learning and more like remembering, much less effort than the French and English he's picked up since. What little he recalls of her is the fall of her pale hair as she'd stooped over him, her hands over his on the keys of the piano, a shadow of a smile that he's still not sure isn't a dream.

Hayato slumps in a pew, and stares up at the elaborate vaulting of the distant ceiling, and resolutely refuses to pray. It's his birthday too, fuck. Thirteen years old and what the hell does he have to show for it, anyway? A collection of burn scars and a list of phone numbers belonging to people who want nothing to do with him unless they need someone blown up. Shit, he needs a cigarette.

He's wandering around the edge of the square, hands cupped in front of his face as he lights up, when he sees her. Actually it's more like he almost walks into her, and he reels backward into an alleyway, clutching at his suddenly-roiling stomach and thanking whoever's up there – gods, angels, the shade of his mother – that he'd only caught a glimpse of her face.

Bianchi doesn't seem to have seen him – thank God, thank God; if he could move around the stomach ache Hayato might even have crossed himself – but the man she's with, some suit with a haircut as expensive as his Armani, spares him a curious glance before walking on. Hayato leans against the stinking wall and tries to squash the sudden panic clawing at his throat. What the fuck is she doing here? She's a freelancer now; Shamal had told him so last they ran into each other, when Hayato had hung around his apartment in Venice for a week or two taking a vicious sort of satisfaction in putting a crimp in his usual perverted activities. And it's not like he particularly cares, but at least it serves his bastard father right. Hayato hopes he knows he fucking deserved it, losing both of them.

"Oi, kid, if you're gonna puke, gerroutta here," the tramp slumped against the trash cans slurs; Hayato makes an effort to pull himself together, shoving down the lingering nausea.

"Fuck you," he mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders as he heads out in the opposite direction to Bianchi. Time to get this the hell over with and get out of here already.

* * *

When it comes down to it, Hayato's a fucking professional. He knows how to shape a charge to direct the force of the blast, knows how to stagger his fuses and cut his charges to take out his targets on his own terms. So it takes him a while to pull it off, but when the bar goes up it goes up in style, a fireball scything the place clean and erupting from the roof in a blaze of sound and fury that rattles windows but somehow avoids causing major structural damage to the rest of the block. A miracle, the fire chief says, crossing himself on the hotel's tiny fuzzy television screen. No, they have no information on the cause yet, but perhaps the liquor, or the gas mains that were scheduled for work...

No doubt someone is paying him; Hayato wonders if it's the suits from the warehouse. It doesn't seem like that bastard Gordi's style. He hunches over his coffee, eyeing the ancient nonna as she shuffles around him with breakfast pastries and a wary eye. He wants nothing more than to get the fuck out of Sicily – Milan, he thinks, would be nice at this time of year, and has the added bonus of being nowhere near the goddamn bastard who he's pretty sure tried to set him up. Leaving now, though, would be too suspicious, and he's not dumb enough to draw attention to himself when whoever owns the warehouse has to be on the lookout.

At least it gives him time to work out what he's going to do to Gordi when he sees him. Hayato mutters a graceless 'grazie' as the nonna shuffles past, one hand tight on the strap of his satchel as he slides around the heavy ancient dining table and out of the door. Not that he looks much like a schoolkid, or even that he's really trying, but there's bound to be a library here somewhere, a place he can hole up and bury himself in the reassuring solidity of facts.

There is a library, and it has enough back-issues of the ISEE Journal among the science periodicals to keep Hayato occupied for a decent amount of time. He's pretty sure there's something really good he could do with self-propagating dynamite series, using the blast field of each detonation to trigger the next, if he can get the timing just right. Fucking Shamal and his paper planes'll have nothing on this, when he gets it down.

By the time he has the formula worked out to his satisfaction, on paper at least, his reading glasses are starting to give him a headache. Hayato sighs, and flips his laptop shut, heading outside for a smoke. Maybe he'll get some coffee as well, he thinks vaguely to himself; it's way past eleven, and the September sun is hot on his head as leans against the stone wall that edges the street, lighting up with an efficient click.

The first breath of smoke swims through his veins, easing the headache and relaxing the knot of tension that's been sitting in his stomach since he'd arrived in Sicily. The job's done, Bianchi's nowhere to be seen, and all that's left is to wait for an appropriate period before getting the fuck back to Naples to collect his damn money and maybe blow Gordi up a bit to show him what happens to people who try and screw over the Smoking Bomb. Like hell some cheapshit wannabe Family is a match for him.

Hayato grinds the smouldering remnants of the cigarette out beneath his heel and stares up at the sky – perfect cloudless blue tempered by the haze of the city. Horns blare and a woman on a Vespa swears loudly as he vaults the wall, dodging across the street between traffic to slip into a dim café. He's got the hotel room for the rest of the week; plenty of time to get his dynamite resupplied, if he finds the right people to ask.

The barista, lazily wiping down the already gleaming marble counter, looks up at him dull-eyed as he enters. Hayato glances about the place – two businessmen with their heads together over documents, too badly dressed and desperate-looking to be mafia, and some geeky student type in the back with her head in a book. Grimacing, Hayato snags a well-thumbed newspaper from an empty table and picks a seat that puts his back firmly to the wall.

He's drained his first cup of espresso and the barista's setting out breads and antipasti on the counter when the atmosphere of the place changes; Hayato glances up, already tense, as two suits – _expensive_ suits, and fuck if that isn't the guy who was with his sister the other day, shit – stroll into the bar. Suddenly the dim cool of the place seems oppressive; Hayato eyes the door, but there's no way to leave now without drawing attention to himself.

His fingers itch for a cigarette; he ducks his head as unobtrusively as possible, watching out of the corner of his eye as the suits chat amiably enough with the barista. If anyone's being shaken down, it's impossible to tell; they might all three be the best of friends. Hayato grinds his teeth and presses his shoulders into the wall behind him, and knows he's fucked when one of the suits, an old guy who moves like he's dangerous even when he's standing still, glances over at him. He's not even surprised when, after another few words to the barista, they head over to his table.

"Smoking Bomb." The old guy takes the seat across from him, examining him soberly, while the guy with the hair drags over a chair from another table.

"What's it to you?" Hayato narrows his eyes, fingering the dynamite in his pocket. God only knows what they're both packing, but he's pretty sure he has enough on him to blow this place sky-high given the chance. Sending himself to hell along with them is a price he'll pay if he has to; he's spent too much time in this business to have any illusions about what mafiosi of this calibre could want with him.

"That was a pretty neat piece of work last night," the one with the hair says conversationally, folding his arms on the table.

"We appreciate your efforts to avoid damage to our facility," the old one says, sparing a brief glance for his associate. "Unfortunately, what Massimo Gordi neglected to tell you was that the bar you hit – where he attempted to buy a stake some weeks ago, and was refused – is also run by our people. Or was." He pauses, and Hayato has time to wonder who the fuck has been playing who before Hair's phone chirps discreetly. He barely glances at it before exchanging nods with the old one.

"Unfortunately for Gordi, this morning there was a freak accident on the Via Sorrentina. They've just recovered his car, or what's left of it."

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Hayato grinds his teeth as the barista breezes over with a tray of espresso cups. "Enough already," he snarls once the tray's been whisked away again, before the suits can open their mouths. "I get it. So who the fuck are you, and what do you want?" There are half a dozen big Families operating in this half of the island, and every damn one of them has connections to his father. The question is how many people he's going to have to take out to avoid getting dragged back home like some disobedient child.

"We... represent the Ninth," the old guy says carefully, and Hayato has time to blink in dawning horror before Hair chips in calmly.

"Vongola the Ninth." The ring on his middle finger glints dully as he sips his coffee, the crest catching the light that filters in from the street, and _shit shit shit_ but he's gone and crossed the fucking Vongola. He's a dead man.

Hayato wants to throw up. His fingers clench around the dynamite in his pocket; if they make a move on him, he's ready to go out with one hell of a bang.

"Relax, kid," Hair advises easily, leaning casually back in his chair and making some arcane signal to the barista that results in a plate of biscotti all but materialising on the table. "We're not here for vengeance. The boss has a use for you."

The only memory Hayato can dredge up of the Ninth boss of the Vongola is a glimpse from his childhood, an elderly man who'd smiled at him and Bianchi and given him a handful of sweets. Hayato had been so surprised at the way his father bowed his head to this old man that he hadn't even noticed when Bianchi had turned the sweets into something unpleasant, and as a result he'd ended up in the infirmary again, puking on the pervert doctor's best shoes.

"The fuck are you talking about?" he spits, pissed off by the memory and still halfway sure that this is just a fancy way of telling him that they've got a bullet with his name on it; or worse, that they're packing him back to his bastard father as some kind of favour or something.

"Putting aside the issue with Gordi," the old one says urbanely, as though he's not talking about the fucker who screwed them both over, and if Hayato wasn't so busy wishing the guy back from the dead so he could kill him again for putting him in this fucking position, he'd be laughing at the idiot for thinking he could put anything over on the fucking Vongola. "You're a talented young man, Hayato Gokudera. You proved that in Venice last winter, and again last night. You must also be aware that the Ninth boss is... not as young as he was, shall we say."

"And?" Hayato coughs to clear his throat, trying to keep his eyes on both of them at once. The hum of the fan overhead and the traffic outside seems to run up and down his bones, and he itches to tumble out of his seat and just _run_.

"The tenth generation has yet to be decided." The old guy leans back in his seat as Hair crunches through a stick of biscotti, eyes sharp on Hayato. "Reborn is in Japan right now, and he's asked for you specifically."

Hayato chokes on air, tries to cover it by snatching up a piece of biscotti that's too powdery-sweet on his tongue. Even he, on the ragged outskirts of this world despite his every effort since he'd left his father's house, knows that name.

"The fuck," he mutters, trying to ignore the sudden clammy dampness of his palms. Vongola wants _him_? Some fucking joke, but he'd be a fool to turn it down. He'd be a fool to believe a word of it. How the hell would someone like Reborn even have heard of a nobody like him.

"I hope you speak Japanese," Hair observes – _in_ Japanese, with a shit-eating grin and a shitty accent that provides just the excuse Hayato needs to finally cross the line from paranoia to pissed off.

"Who the fuck do you take me for?" he snaps, pulling his battered back of cigarettes from his pocket with shaking fingers and lighting up despite the No Smoking sign on the table. "If you think I'm just going to swallow your damn story..."

"That's your choice, of course." The old guy's accent is marginally better, at least. "You can walk out of here, and you'll likely never see us again, but I think we both know that with your history and connections, no Family worth their word is going to take you in."

That hits exactly as the bastard no doubt intended it to. Hayato breathes through gritted teeth, cigarette clenched in his fingers and a painful knot in his stomach. He's every bit as out of options as if they'd held a gun to his head, damn it.

"Reborn is offering you a chance," Hair says, flipping a card across the table as he rises, shrugging his jacket easily into place. "It's up to you what you make of it. Ciao, kid." And they're gone, the barista all but bowing in their wake without a work about the bill. Hayato is left sitting there, staring at the embossed crest on the otherwise plain card, and at the eleven digits of the phone number scrawled beneath it.

* * *

It takes him two days, two days of lumpy uncomfortable hotel bed and the nonna's bad morning coffee, two days of wandering around the city eking out his money as well as he can, two days of devouring every volume in the paranormal section of the library, before he brings himself to it. He stares at his phone for a long time after he punches the number in, half of him certain that this is just another way to get him out of the picture, just another empty fucking promise, and when he eventually hits the key to connect the call he's grimly certain that he must be the most gullible fool in Italy.

It rings twice, and then there's a click that makes him jump half out of his skin with how tense he is. "Connecting," a toneless female voice drones, and Hayato realises he's clutching the phone hard enough to bruise as a series of electronic noises echo down the line. He wants this so damn badly that there's just no way it can be anything but another fucking lie, and still he can't pass it up.

Three distant, tinny rings, and a hiss of static as the line is picked up.

"Ciaossu, Gokudera Hayato." The voice is high, childish, and deadly competent; Hayato inhales a sharp breath. "I've been waiting for your call. Have you decided?"


End file.
